Tag: police state

New York Assembly Bill Would Prohibit Geolocation Tracking and Geofencing Warrants

A bill introduced in the New York Assembly would ban geolocation tracking and geofencing warrants. Passage of the legislation would not only protect privacy in New York; it would also hinder the growth of the federal surveillance state.

Asm. Michaelle Solages (D) and a large coalition of fellow Democrats introduced Assembly Bill 3306 (A3306) on Feb. 2. The bill is a companion to Senate Bill 217 (S217) introduced last month. The proposed law would ban the search of geolocation data or keyword data of a group of people who are under no individual suspicion of having committed a crime but rather are defined by having been at a given location at a given time or searched particular words, phrases, character strings, or websites. It would also bar courts from issuing reverse location search warrants and create a process to suppress any evidence gathered in violation of the law.

In effect, the passage of A3306 would end a process called “geofencing.” Reverse search warrants authorize police to search broad geographical areas to determine who was near a given place at a given time. In practice, these warrants give police permission to use Google location data to engage in massive fishing expeditions and subject hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people to police location tracking. According to the New York Times, federal agents first utilized the practice in 2016. According to the report, these broadly construed warrants help police pinpoint possible suspects and witnesses in the absence of other clues. Google employees said the company often responds to a single warrant with location information on dozens or hundreds of devices. Police can gather similar information using cell-site simulators, often called “stingrays.”

According to the New York Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), concerns about how location data collected during the state’s battle against COVID-19 could be used by police. The Wall Street Journal reported that federal, state and local governments were partnering in a warrantless cellphone tracking program to gather information on Americans’ movements in over 500 cities.

“We are deeply alarmed by federal, state and local officials’ growing use of warrantless location tracking and so-called ‘reverse search warrants,” STOP executive director Albert Fox Cahn said. “While this type of tracking may be appropriate for some public health officials, it’s outrageous that this information is being shared with police. COVID-19 cannot grant New York’s police departments a blank check for surveillance. Even when police gain a warrant, wide-area geolocation searches make a mockery of the Constitution. When a single court order okays searches on hundreds or even thousands of individuals, it undermines the entire purpose of requiring warrants in the first place. The judges approving these orders simply can’t know how much data they’re handing over to law enforcement when they approve the request.”

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Saudi Arabia’s ‘middle finger to Biden’: Kingdom increases US citizen’s sentence by three YEARS to 19 after White House condemned punishment over Khashoggi tweets

The son of a US citizen jailed in Saudi Arabia has slammed the Biden administration’s attempts to free his father after his prison sentence was lengthened by an extra three years.  

Saad Almadi has seen his time behind bars extended from 16 years to 19 years after he was imprisoned for a series of tweets criticizing the Saudi government. 

The political prisoner’s son Ibrahim slammed the handling of his father’s case after the US State Department told him his father would spend even longer in prison.

He told The Post: ‘It’s not a slap in the face, it’s a middle finger.

‘When the US asked for an appeal, they said: “Here you go, 19 years!”

Ibrahim noted that his father has lost ‘more than 80 pounds’ behind bars, after an arrest which was triggered when he targeted the Saudi regime in a series of tweets. 

The social media posts that led to his arrest included condemnations over Saudi government’s inability to protect its borders from rockets fired by Houthi rebels in Yemen, a group allied with Iran. 

He also posted support for naming a street after murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post reporter whose death was allegedly orchestrated by the Saudi government. 

Almadi, a 72-year-old retired project manager who was living in Florida, was arrested in November 2021 while visiting family in Saudi Arabia after he published the tweets.

The White House has made several remarks hitting out at Almadi’s treatment, however President Biden has not directly commented on it and has been accused of taking a soft stance with the Saudi regime.

Ibrahim pointed to the recent release of WNBA star Brittney Griner as he criticized the Biden administration’s failed efforts to free his father. 

He particularly hit out at the State Department’s refusal to officially label his father as being ‘wrongfully detained’, a move that would increase pressure on the Saudi government to release him from prison.  

‘The only way for my father to get out is through ‘wrongful detention’, he said. ‘That’s how Brittney Griner got out …. that’s what works with dictators.’

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Fencing Reinstalled Around Capitol Building Ahead of State of the Union Address

For the third year in a row, the U.S. Capitol Police constructed a metal fence around the Capitol building ahead of President Biden’s State of the Union address.

The fence was initially installed in the aftermath of the January 6 Capitol protests and remained in place for months afterwards. It was eventually removed in July of 2021, though the barrier has been reinstalled on multiple occasions. This includes a rally in support of January 6 prisoners, a planned trucker protest and previous State of the Union addresses.

The latest construction was ordered by the U.S. Capitol Police Board, a group of congressional security officials who oversee the Capitol grounds, but whose meetings and reports are not made publicly available, CBS News reported.  “National Special Security Events require a robust security plan, so out of an abundance of caution, the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Capitol Police temporarily put up a fence around the U.S. Capitol Building,” said the U.S. Capitol Police in a statement.

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Canada passes online censorship bill

Canada’s Senate has passed Bill C-11 (Online Streaming Act), which critics refer to as “the internet censorship bill,” along with several amendments.

The bill passed in the third reading with 43 votes in favor and 15 against, which means it is now inching ever closer to becoming law since in the next step it goes back to the House of Commons, which will consider the amendments.

The government proposed the bill as a way to amend the Broadcasting Act by modifying Canada’s broadcasting policy, and give the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) new powers as a regulator.

Opponents of the bill, including Conservative politicians and advocacy groups, however, see it as a way to increase the government’s ability to censor online speech it dislikes.

The effort to bring this legislation to life in Canada has quite a story behind it: initially, the Online Streaming Act, then known as Bill C-10, passed in the House of Commons in June 2021 but failed in the Senate.

It made a comeback as Bill C-11 in February 2022, got cleared by the House in June, and finally last week made it through the Senate.

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Most Important First Amendment Case You’ve Never Heard Of: Biden Regime Tries to Toss a Young Man in Jail for 10 Years for Anti-Hillary Memes

Douglass Mackey is alleged to be one of the many anonymous Twitter users who made the 2016 election so different, so memorable, and so important.

Like other anonymous internet memesmiths (anons), Mackey had no external reason that anyone should care what he said. He held no office. He had no byline at an elite publication. He had no vast pool of wealth that conferred legitimacy, deserved or undeserved, on what he had to say.

Mackey’s notability, like that of Bronze Age Pervert or Libs of TikTok, came exclusively from what he had to say, and that people found it funny and compelling. Over the summer and fall of 2016, Mackey allegedly went by the nom-de-tweet Ricky Vaughn (after Charlie Sheen’s character in Major League) and collected tens of thousands of followers who found him funny and compelling. Mackey was not single-handedly responsible for getting Donald Trump elected. But the work he allegedly did along with dozens of others is what made Trump’s victory possible. An MIT analysis estimated that Ricky Vaughn was a bigger influence on the 2016 election than NBC News.

But for the regime, the specter of anonymous individuals making the system tremble was too much. And so, for more than two years, the regime has been battling to send Mackey to prison.

You might not know much about Mackey’s case. It’s far less notorious than the January 6 prosecutions, or the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. But in terms of how much the speech matters for American liberty, it is as important as either of those — perhaps more so. 

In January 2021, shortly after the January 6 incident inaugurated a national anti-MAGA crackdown, the Department of Justice charged Mackey with “conspiring … to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.”

Mackey’s offense? Illegal memes.

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Elon Musk Names Obscure Agency as ‘Worst Offender’ in US Government Censorship

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has pointed to a little-known government agency as the “worst offender” in terms of U.S. government censorship and media manipulation, alleging that it flagged Twitter accounts for suppression based on dubious criteria like promoting the lab leak theory of COVID-19 origins.

In a series of tweets on Tuesday, Musk named the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) as a “threat to our democracy” and pointed to independent journalist Matt Taibbi’s extensive Jan. 3 thread that delves into the agency’s interactions with Twitter on content censorship.

Taibbi’s thread that Musk pointed to for more details on the GEC’s activity includes internal correspondence among Twitter executives that indicates that even they took a dim view of engagement with the GEC, considering it “political” and “press-happy” and as having a “track record of actively advancing specific ideological agendas.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the GEC with a request for comment but received no response by publication.

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Walls Work? Biden Mocked As Capitol Police Reinstall Metal Fencing For His SOTU Speech

Capitol Police have reinstalled metal fencing around the U.S. Capitol this week ahead of President Biden’s upcoming State of the Union Address on Tuesday.

CBS News is reporting that the Capitol fencing, originally installed following the January 6 riot and frequently utilized for defense ever since, is being reinstalled in conjunction with the SOTU address.

They describe it as “controversial.”

“For the third year in a row, an eight-foot, black metal fence will surround the U.S. Capitol complex during an address to Congress by President Joe Biden,” they write.

“The fencing, which is plastered with signs reading ‘Area closed by order of the United States Capitol Police Board,’ has become an increasingly common and controversial security measure” since the Capitol riot.

The fencing is expected to remain in place until at least Wednesday.

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Serial Rapist Cop, Who Pulled Over Women to Rape Them at Night, Gets Insultingly Low Sentence

As the Free Thought Project frequently reports, when most people see police lights in their rearview mirror, the last thing they feel is “protected.” When a cop pulls you over, it most likely means you are about to be extorted for a victimless crime. However, if the cop in the story below was pulling you over, it meant something much worse than mere extortion. If you were a woman, it meant you were about to be kidnapped and raped.

As TFTP previously reported, Arizona Department of Public Safety Trooper Tremaine Jackson, 43, was arrested on a whopping 61 charges of everything from kidnapping to sexual assault. The trooper, who’d been with the department for 13 years, is accused of pulling women over and sexually assaulting them.

As part of a plea deal, Jackson pleaded guilty to the following charges:

  • Attempted kidnap with sexual intent
  • Unlawful imprisonment with sexual intent
  • Unlawful sexual conduct by a peace officer
  • Bribery with sexual intent
  • Fraud with sexual intent

This month, Jackson’s blue privilege shined through — despite the slew of charges and victims — and he was sentenced to just five years in jail.

The taxpayers of Maricopa County were held liable for his sick acts instead. The lawsuit states that Arizona should be held liable for the wrongful conduct of its officers, employees, agents, districts, divisions, and subdivisions.

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Looks Like Cops Put a Fake MLK Quote on a Police Cruiser for Black History Month

The police department in Columbus, Ohio is celebrating Black History Month with a themed cop car, which uses a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Be the peace you wish to see in the world.” 

Just one of the many problems with this move is that it appears MLK never said that.

The Columbus Division of Police unveiled the car it dubbed “History 1” Wednesday, saying in a social media post that the car will “celebrate the achievements of African Americans & recognize their roles in our history.” The video announcing the car plays excerpts from King’s legendary “I Have a Dream” speech.

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